DEVOPSdigest

Kubernetes, or K8s, will soon be synonymous with application delivery, if it isn't already.

This rise in cloud-native platform adoption represents a significant shift in how businesses deploy applications at scale. The innovation needs of tomorrow require faster application deployment that reaches more people. Kubernetes' scalability, flexibility and operational simplicity make it the perfect platform for this innovation.

Organizations planning to make Kubernetes the base of operations for their workloads should know what this new cloud-native landscape will look like and how to prepare for it.

Life in a Cloud-Native World

Portworx by Pure Storage partnered with Dimensional Research to commission a survey of 571 Kubernetes experts, IT professionals with more than four years of experience directly managing data services in a Kubernetes environment. 80% said their organizations will build all or most of their new applications in cloud-native platforms within the next five years. Additionally, more than half (58%) said they plan to move some of their virtual machine (VM) workloads to Kubernetes.

The survey also reveals that of those respondents planning to migrate some of their workloads to Kubernetes, almost two-thirds (65%) plan to do so in the next two years.

This data signals an urgency to migrate workloads not seen since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, driven by a number of contributing factors.

The first is a recent acquisition of a major VM platform which may change how organizations use that system. Experts in the space are not yet sure how this acquisition will change the VM space but the uncertainty could be leading to this desire to migrate workloads.

In addition, while VMs and Kubernetes each have their strengths, Kubernetes offers specific advantages that make it perfect for application deployment at scale. According to the survey, 79% of experts said they were transitioning due to K8's scalability and flexibility.

Moreover, 79% of experts cited the operational simplicity and cost reduction K8s offers. The containers on Kubernetes share a host operating system as opposed to VMs which each have their own operating system. The former allows application development and deployment that reduces the use of hardware resources and operational costs.

Kubernetes will also be the foundation for data-intensive workloads in this new cloud-native reality. This includes databases (which 72% of experts said they were running on K8s), analytics (72%) and artificial intelligence/machine learning (54%). Some are already realizing the benefits from their decisions to run these workloads on Kubernetes, including faster deployments, higher uptime, and more flexibility between public and private clouds.

Platform Engineering in a New Cloud-Native World

Succeeding with Kubernetes requires a focus on platform engineering, or designing internal frameworks that streamline software development. Platform engineers allow developers to leverage Kubernetes as a self-service tool. This removes the need for traditional middleware and creates a highly available and reliable developer workflow. As a result, developers can innovate and deploy faster.

Platform engineering is evolving from a single skill designated for one person to a multi-faceted function of each company's software development process. To that end, 63% of Kubernetes experts said their organization is willing to invest in training, consultants (60%) and the hiring of skilled engineers (52%).

Navigating Potential Gaps in Kubernetes

With all the benefits Kubernetes offers, there are also some limitations organizations must address. For example, multiple experts we surveyed cited gaps in availability, disaster management, and high performance storage as they leveraged Kubernetes. However, 71% of respondents said they would like a centralized data management platform — especially one that unifies VM and container data management. Although Kubernetes is the future of application deployment, many organizations expect to use both K8s and VMs depending on the application they're developing.

When data management or platform engineering personnel have to switch between disparate data management platforms, it increases the resources necessary to practice good data management. That's why organizations look for data management solutions that give them one unified place to manage their application data, regardless of whether that application is in Kubernetes or VMs.

Preparing for a Cloud-Native Future

Kubernetes experts have made it clear that cloud native platforms are where innovation will take place today and in the future. To succeed in this cloud native future, organizations will need a strategy to migrate workloads from VMs, a strong platform engineering function, and tools that will protect your data at each step of the development process. Organizations that invest in these tenets and create a strong cloud native infrastructure will streamline DevOps workflows and create a competitive advantage.